Tannat

I was intrigued by the initial concept of this book but I wasn’t all that into it. It was okay, but there were too many things that didn’t work for me, although I may have trouble articulating all of them.

The premise is that the FBI has caught up with a serial killer who has been imprisoning girls, tattooing them with butterfly wings, keeping them around for a while, and preserving them when they die. Maya, one of the survivors, is set up as an uncooperative victim who tells her story to FBI agents, who question how much of her story they should believe because they think she’s not telling them everything.

This isn’t really a novel about FBI agents or a thriller, really. It’s all about Maya, and she’s really not that uncooperative because she talks for pages and pages and pages. The book jumps from the present day (in the present tense, too) to her story (told in the past tense) but after a while her story didn’t seem like she was telling a story. It seemed like what you’d get in a television program where someone is telling a story, then you fade into their flashback and continue to watch the scenes play out rather than actually continue to listen to a story. It was more about Maya’s story than the FBI agents supposedly trying to interrogate her, although some lip service is paid to the device. There was just something off about the whole thing.

Hearing about all the different girls and what they were good at or what their personalities were like got tiresome after a while too. And the whole thing with Desmond strained credulity. Finally, for such a dark book, the ending was super fluffy.

So I don’t recommend it, but I’m sure some people would really like the book.

I read this for the start square (free read) for booklikes-opoly. At 276 pages, this gives me another $3 for my bank, which gives me a balance of $59.